Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a fluidic device, an exosome analysis method, a biomolecule analysis method, and a biomolecule detection method.
Description of Related Art
An exosome is a small lipid vesicle with a diameter of 30 nm to 100 nm, and is secreted into a body fluid such as blood, urine, and saliva from various cells such as a tumor cell, a dendritic cell, a T cell, and a B cell, as a fused body of an endosome and a cell membrane.
Abnormal cells such as cancer cells express a specific protein, a nucleic acid, a microRNA, or the like in a cell membrane. Moreover, an exosome secreted in a body fluid also expresses microRNA or the like derived from a cell of a secretion source.
For this reason, it is expected that a technology is to be established in which it is possible to examine an abnormality within a living body by analyzing a biomolecule existing inside the membrane of the exosome in a body fluid, even without performing a biopsy examination.
Here, the biopsy examination refers to a clinical examination for diagnosis or the like of a disease through observation of a lesion site using a microscope after recovering tissue from the lesion site.
In response to such expectation, a method of analyzing an exosome, in which whether or not a specimen includes a cancer cell is evaluated, by isolating cancer cell-derived exosomes that contain microRNA (hereinafter, also referred to as miRNA) from a biological sample and determining the amount of predetermined miRNA expressed in the cancer cell-derived exosomes, and then, comparing such amount of predetermined miRNA with the amount of miRNA expressed in a specimen-derived exosomes has been proposed (refer to Patent Document 1).